TOBI'S DESK

  The of Quote of the Week is by Wole Soyinka: “The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.” The quote is drawn from his prison memoirs The Man Died.  Wishing you all a great week! from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/3gN1bzF

It’s Biafra Remembrance Day, and while many authors have written about the Biafra War, perhaps no other book on the subject has captured the world’s attention as much as Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. To mark the occasion this year, Adichie released a short video on her Instagram TV channel responding to questions […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2XD4fVW

Elisa Gabbert. Photo: © Adalena Kavanagh. Elisa Gabbert’s The Unreality of Memory is one of those books that send you to your notebook every page or so, desperate not to lose either the thought the author has deftly placed in your mind or the title of a work she has now compelled you to read. The essays encompass sickness and trauma, anesthesia and memory, politics and political apathy, but owing to the force of Gabbert’s attention, the book remains determinedly cohesive. Written before COVID -19 altered all our lives so irretrievably, it is also a work of uncanny prescience. With this chronology in mind, it is difficult to know what to make of the following: “Many experts think the most likely culprit of a future pandemic is some version of the flu; flus are common, highly contagious, and especially dangerous when there’s a new strain to which people have limited immunity.” Or this: “I wonder if the way the world gets worse will barely outpace the rate at which we get used to it.”...

As we mourn the death of George Floyd, whose life was brutally taken by a white police officer in Minneapolis, let us reflect on something Teju Cole wrote a few days after another black man, Michael Brown, was shot in Ferguson, Missouri, back in 2014. The piece, titled “Black Body: Rereading James Baldwin’s ‘Stranger in […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2XfhBsC

Lolwe is a literary magazine founded in January 2020 by Kenyan writer and editor Troy Onyango. One of the magazine’s objectives is to pay writers for their work. However, the magazine is currently having trouble meeting this objective because it is not able to generate enough funds to be self-sustaining. At the moment, Onyango sponsors […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/36LsfdJ

Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other has been shortlisted for The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. Sponsored by The Orwell Foundation and conferred in honor of English author and social critic George Orwell, the Orwell Prizes aim to “encourage good writing and thinking about politics” as winning entries are more or less required to “strive to […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/3dg5b9w

Paint brushes and watercolor paints on the table in a workshop, selective focus, close up “In the Universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between them, there are doors.” William Blake Psychiatrist Daniel Siegel explains the brain is like a folded hand. A fist. The thumb against the palm represents the limbic regions, brain zones dealing with emotions, stress. The folded fingers are the cerebral cortex, which  help with rational thought and regulating moods. The fingernails are the pre-frontal cortex, the part of the brain used for decision making, ethics, and morality. All these zones work together as a team. Faced with panic, the fingers spring up, we lose rationality, ethics, and are left with our emotions. We often rely on our basic instincts: fight, flight, or freeze. We may feel disorganized, unable to concentrate or make decisions, suffer from mood swings, frustration, and bouts of adrenalin. The trick is to find a way to bring th...

John Opie, Mary Wollstonecraft , ca. 1797, oil on canvas, 30 1/4″ x 25 1/4″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. A young English woman named Mary Wollstonecraft lived by her wits and her pen. At thirty-four, Mary did not expect to marry, but she soon met an American adventurer named Gilbert Imlay and believed she’d found her soul mate. In love, they moved to Paris where they had a daughter, named Fanny. But Gilbert began to travel more and more, and soon it became apparent he had a wandering eye as well. Heartbroken over this desertion, Mary drank laudanum. She survived, but within a matter of months was despondent again and jumped from a bridge into the Thames. Miraculously she was rescued and nursed back to health by William Godwin, like Mary a political radical, to whom she quickly developed a strong attachment. Later married and happy, they read Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther aloud together the night before she went into labor. Tragically, Mary died a few days after ...

In her monthly column,   Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be. “Shameless” and “unpublishable”—this was the reaction of her publishers when the Dutch writer Dola de Jong first submitted her novel The Tree and the Vine ( De Thuiswacht ) in 1950. Four years later, it made it into print, thanks in large part to the backing of prominent literary figures such as the Dutch poet Leo Vroman and the Belgian writer Marnix Gijsen, both European exiles living in America (as was de Jong by this point in her life). She also had the support of renowned New York editor Maxwell Perkins, the man who’d discovered both F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, and who’d published de Jong’s And the Field is the World (1945), the story of a young Jewish couple who flee the Netherlands for Morocco on the eve of the Second World War. What made The Tree and the Vine so shocking was its candid depiction of queer desire. It follows two young women in N...

Hey Brittle Paper readers and followers! We’re excited to announce the second installment of our #WeTurnToBooks series on Instagram Live, happening throughout the month of June. Our line-up this time around includes Nnedi Okorafor, Kiru Taye, Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, and Ayesha Harruna Attah — all authors who have recently published a new book, or have […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/3dfQvaA

Egon Schiele, Schwangere . Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Over these past months, nine, to be exact, I’ve come to think that pleasure and pain always have something to do with things either entering or exiting your body. Nine months ago I didn’t know that a series of events related to those entrances and exits would converge that November, the same month I turned thirty. My father was diagnosed with colon cancer, Adriana committed suicide by throwing herself from a hotel window, and I was lying in a Spanish National Health Service hospital bed, recovering from major surgery. I returned home, devastated by the news, and physically very weak. I can scarcely remember the days following my operation, two weeks during a particularly cold winter, during which I’d needed J’s help for almost everything. To cut my meat, to brush my teeth, and to clean my incisions. I’d had some excess mammary glands removed from beneath my armpits and I could barely move my arms. I had two enormous ...

Nina MacLaughlin’s six-part series on the sky will run every Wednesday for the next several weeks.  Paul Signac, View of Saint-Tropez , 1896 Sky blue. Please picture it. Put a swath of sky blue in your mind. Just for a moment. Sky blue. Close your eyes. You see it. Now, look out the window, up and out to your sky. I wonder, what color do you see? Does it match the color your mind projected? In the room where I sit now, in my apartment on the first floor, in the small Northeastern city where I live, a little after eight in the morning, sun slants across the dusk-orange couch and the brown blanket slung on the back of it. The windowpanes repeat themselves in shadow, elongated squares over the dark red rug. From behind the roofline horizon, dish towel light seeps through a tangled net of branches. What little sky I can see is not so much color as light. Looking at it, I wonder, if I didn’t know what color the sky typically was, would I call it blue ? I see a blue-ish-ness, a grayw...

Every week, the editors of  The Paris Review  lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by  signing up for the Redux newsletter . Janet Malcolm. Photo: © Nina Subin. This week at The Paris Review , we’re thinking about distance, travel, and all the vacations we’re not taking this summer. Read on for Janet Malcolm’s Art of Nonfiction interview , Alejandro Zambra’s short story “ Long Distance ,” and Kenneth Koch’s poem “ To the French Language .” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not  subscribe  to  The Paris Review  and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. And for as long as we’re flattening the curve,  The Paris Review  will be sending out a new weekly newsletter, The Art of Distance, featuring unlocked ar...